Commonwealth v. Keaton’s Empirical Analysis
1999
Citation profile
53 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 53 later decisions — most recently August 2024 · most notably Commonwealth v. Briggs (2011), Commonwealth v. Cousar (2007)
53 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Soberon v. United States · Needler v. Valley National Bank of Arizona · Boyde v. California · Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board · Morgan v. Illinois
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[While e]vidence of distinct crimes is inadmissible solely to demonstrate a defendant’s criminal tendencies[, s]uch evidence is admissible ... to show a common plan, scheme or design embracing commission of multiple crimes, or to establish the identity of the perpetrator, so long as proof of one crime tends to prove the others. This will be true when there are shared similarities in the details of each crime.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“1) the offenses were committed over a period of less than six months; 2) each was committed at night; 3) in each case, [the appellant] forced his victim into an abandoned house; 4) the abandoned houses were all in the same neighborhood in which [the appellant] and the victims lived; 5) the abandoned houses were within a two-block radius of each other; 6) each offense involved a combination of bondage or strangulation of the victim; 7) each offense involved the rape of the victim; and 8) all victims shared similar personal characteristics: all were black females in their late twenties or thirties, all were acquainted with [the appellant], and all were crack cocaine addicts.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[W]hile precluding arguments based on DNA evidence because such evidence had not been presented, the court ruled that defense counsel could argue the absence of scientific evidence linking Keaton to any of the blood and semen samples that the police gathered from the victims’ garments and other physical objects. Immediately after this ruling, defense counsel proceeded to highlight the fact that the police did not produce any such scientific or other evidence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.